From the archives: March 5, 1995 / Hiking America’s trail

A dozen writers and photographers from five eastern newspapers were on top of Springer Mountain, southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. They were poised to take the first step of a 2,158-mile adventure along one of the world’s premier hiking trails, a serpentine footpath tripping over the ridge tops of 14 states from Georgia, through Pennsylvania, to Maine.

It is a long way, this sylvan slipper. So long that for the next seven months, as they took turns hiking northeast, the trail disappeared into a long green tunnel, or over a rise, or around a lake, or down a switchback.

For a modern adventurer in America, hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail — what enthusiasts call a thru-hike — rates somewhere on the first hand when you tick off the best of America’s outdoor quests. The Appalachian Trail is a long, testing journey of discovery. The trail is important not so much for what you find there — because many have traveled that way before — but for what you bring to the search.

Benton MacKaye, a Connecticut Yankee and Harvard forestry school graduate, never even considered that people would thru-hike the trail when he wrote about it in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921. Instead, he envisioned the trail as the backbone of a recreational network providing a refuge from the pressures of modern society and an opportunity for rejuvenation.

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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site.